Neighborhoods may simply not have an adequate opportunity structure to support the families optimally and the children optimally.

NARRATOR:
Erica, Leroy and DaNayah live in the Boston neighborhood of Mattapan, which has struggled with disinvestment and racial segregation for decades. Here, unemployment is more than twice the national average. The banks have thrown 500 homes into foreclosure. 1 in 5 adults here reports living in persistent sadness.

Some people live in neighborhoods where there are not good schools, where there’s no tax base, that’s the structure that they live in and we look at how we’ve structured race in America, blacks and Latinos are more likely to live in those structures. And if you live in that structure, your life outcomes are severely truncated. We know that if we take the same family and expose them to high opportunity areas, the kids will do better.

James Heckman, Nobel Laureate in Economics, 2000, University of Chicago:

What we’ve seen is a tremendous disparity, a growing disparity between the haves and the have-nots, and with it disparities in the environments of children, so for the next generation, so it looks bad. And the problem is that if we don’t address those inequalities, we’re gonna find ourselves living with the consequences of those inequalities.